Excellent Spam Defense Plugin |
If you have run a blog for more than 5 minutes you have been made aware of just how bad the comment spammers can be. My one main blog averages 50-75 a day. Fortunately, Wordpress comes with a pretty good spam tool pre-installed called Akismet. While it is an excellent tool that I have found catches 99% of the spam on my site, you still need to weed through the spam wasteland the Akismet leaves behind to make sure that nothing got caught that shouldn’t have or at a minimum to delete the various Viagra and porn comments from your queue. Enter a fairly new tool that takes care of the aforementioned problem.
WP-SpamFree aims to prevent the major source of comment spam from even getting to your site, the automated spambots. The author of WP-SpamFree knew from experience that the majority of these spambots couldn’t handle cookies or javascript so he came up with a seamless way to take advantage of that weakness by making the comment procedure include these 2 features that most human web browsers have activated by default.
WP-SpamFree isn’t designed to take the place of Akismet as even the plugin author admits that while less than 1% of spambots can handle javascript, some indeed do and either way trackback spam is a completely different animal which bypasses the comment form altogether. Because of that he recommends you use it along with Akismet to catch virtually all Spam from the spambots and so far from my unscientific testing, it works like a champ.
As I said earlier, my primary blog averages 50-75 spam comments a day, well over 15,000 to date. So far in the 3 days I have had the plugin installed, Akismet has had to catch nothing, 3 days without a single spam comment. Of course spammers are a crafty lot and I am sure they will find a way to circumvent this plugin, especially if it becomes popular. Until then though, adding this to Akismet on your Wordpress blog is a 1-2 spam prevention punch that is hard to beat.
